Why Strongmen Win in Weak States Roberto Stefan Foa WHY STRONGMEN WIN in WEAK STATES

January 2021, Volume 32, Number 1 $15.00

Mainstream Parties in Crisis Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer Sheri Berman and Hans Kundnani Fernando Casal Bértoa and José Rama The Arab Spring at 10 Tarek Masoud The Three Faces of the Indian State Madhav Khosla and Milan Vaishnav

Plus essays on: The End of the Backsliding Paradigm Kleptocrats in Paradise Japan After Shinzo Abe Is Meritocracy Just? Sri Lanka’s Return to Ethnocracy

Why Strongmen Win in Weak States Roberto Stefan Foa WHY STRONGMEN WIN IN WEAK STATES

Roberto Stefan Foa

Roberto Stefan Foa is university lecturer in politics at the University of Cambridge, director of the YouGov-Cambridge Centre for Public Opin- ion Research, and co-director of the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Democracy.

After five years of populist breakthroughs across Europe, the United States, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia, scholars are far from discovering any “universal theory” that can explain why illiberal politicians appeal to voters in every time and place. Yet in the context of Western societies, at least, recent theories examining the respective roles of “economic grievance” and “cultural backlash” have helped to shed some light on the issue. On the one hand, scholars such as Barry Eichengreen, Dani Rodrik, and Hanspeter Kriesi have exam- ined how the economic disruptions caused by globalization, including rising income inequality, have led voters in the West’s “left-behind” industrial and rural regions to support extremist parties such as the French National Rally or Greece’s Golden Dawn.1 On the other side of this debate, scholars such as Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris have shown how the political divide between prosperous metropolitan areas and conservative hinterlands in Europe and the United States is rooted not only in socioeconomic disparities, but also in diverging values and beliefs, as formerly dominant groups react against socially progressive policies.2 Yet while such theories capture important dynamics at play in West- ern countries, they do not travel well to democracies in the developing world. Contrary to theories of economic grievance, many “authoritarian populist” leaders outside the West—from Rodrigo Duterte in the Phil- ippines to Vladimir Putin in Russia to Narendra Modi in India—find their support base not among the excluded or downtrodden, but instead among upwardly mobile, small-town business owners and new urban professionals. And contrary to theories of cultural backlash, it is often

Journal of Democracy Volume 32, Number 1 January 2021 © 2021 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press Roberto Stefan Foa 53 the supporters of establishment parties—such as the rural backers of India’s Congress party or the heartland northeastern electorate of the Workers’ Party in Brazil—who offer the best examples of “traditional” beliefs or lifestyles, in contrast to the generally urban and socially “modernizing” supporters of the new antisystem challengers.3 If we are to understand why authoritarian strongmen have won elections in so many developing democracies, we also need to acknowledge the void that such leaders claim to fill—namely, the erosion of political authority. In many such societies, corruption, criminality, and violence not only are pervasive, but have worsened over time, granting the “law and order” pitch of leaders such as Duterte in the Philippines, Modi in India, or Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro a reach that goes well beyond mere cultural conservatives. In particular, their platforms typically resonate with a section of the new urban middle class that is self-made and upwardly mobile, situated outside the existing network of patronage politics, and frustrated at the persistence of urban crime, inefficient public services, and widespread clientelism and graft. It is this coalition of supporters that has secured these leaders an electoral majority.4 In developing democracies it is not so much the losers but the “winners” of globalization who are most likely to support such forms of conservative populism—and ironically, perhaps, they do so precisely because rising expectations regarding probity in office, public order, and public-sector clientelism and graft have pushed voters away from establishment politics and toward antisystem parties and movements.

Democratization and State-Building

To understand the rise of authoritarian strongmen in developing democracies, then, it is important to recognize the divergence of state-building trajectories and democratization trajectories over recent decades. In the early twenty-first century, democratic reform and building state capacity were generally seen as complementary processes, with international policy makers advocating competi- tive multiparty elections as a solution for countries facing problems ranging from endemic corruption to state fragility to gaps in infra- structure or welfare provision. Yet the reality is that elections by themselves cannot guarantee progress on the road to building an effective bureaucracy, clamping down on organized crime, or ensuring the efficient and equitable provision of schools, roads, and hospi- tals. Across the world there is wide variation in the degree to which new democracies have succeeded in building effective institutions and strengthening public accountability (Figure 1), and this divergence may help to explain when and where authoritarian challengers emerge triumphant. Since the “third wave” of democratization that occurred across the 54 Journal of Democracy

Figure 1—Changes in Control of Corruption in Third-Wave Democracies, 2000–2018

Southeast Asia 0.500.50

Improving Corruption Baltic States

0.250.25 Northeast Asia

0.00.00

Central Europe

−0.25 -0.25 Latin America & the Caribbean Sub-Saharan Africa -0.50−0.50 Worsening Corruption

Southern Change in Control of Corruption Index -0.75−0.75 Europe 20002000 2005 2005 2010 2010 2015 2015 2020 2020 Note: Changes in population-weighted aggregate scores, by region; line thickness reflects total population. Southeast Asia: Indonesia and the Philippines Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania Northeast Asia: South Korea and Taiwan Central Europe: Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia Latin America and the Caribbean: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Sal- vador, Grenada, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay. Sub-Saharan Africa: Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Mauritius, Namibia, S~ao Tomé and Prín- cipe, and South Africa Southern Europe: Greece, Portugal, and Spain world from the 1970s to the late 1990s, there have undoubtedly been success stories, in which democratic transition has brought newfound scrutiny of senior politicians by journalists and activists. In South Korea, for example, the 2016–17 “candlelight revolution”—which brought improved executive oversight after years of presidential scandals—provides a demonstration of the robust democratic culture that has taken shape since the country’s 1987 transition. In Taiwan, a “bureaucratic authoritarian” state has been steadily transformed into a democracy with robust civic engagement, most recently notable for its role in combatting the novel coronavirus pandemic. In postcommunist Europe, the three Baltic states have shown how in the span of one generation, cohesive national elites can steer a country through a transition from authoritarian central planning to a regulated market economy under democratic rule. And in one of the world’s largest new Roberto Stefan Foa 55 democracies, Indonesia, a combination of radical decentralization and top-down enforcement from Jakarta are starting to check the distrib- uted system of clientelism that replaced the centralized kleptocracy of the Suharto years. For scholars of democracy, these “success sto- In countries where ries” highlight an important point: political parties swept Simultaneous democratic transition to power with ambitious and state-building are possible, and social-reform agendas, can be achieved across diverse regions and stages of economic devel- clientelism has grown opment.5 as direct party-to-voter Skeptics of democratic state- channels have been used building, however, have no shortage to distribute public goods of counterexamples to draw upon. and benefits, leading to Across Latin America, Africa, and resentment over unequal both Southern and Eastern Europe, access to resources. newly elected governments have struggled to overcome endemic problems of corruption, criminality, and state fragility.6 These difficulties are reflected across a wide range of indicators, ranging from homicide rates to assessments of the ease of doing business to ratings of bureaucratic quality.7 But if we restrict ourselves to a fairly conventional measure for some of the world’s largest new democracies—Transparency International’s Corruption Percep- tions Index—we can see that in the last decade alone Brazil has fallen from 75th to 105th place, Mexico from 89th to 138th, and South Africa from 55th to 73rd position. So why have public accountability and transparency eroded in so many young or reemerging democracies? There is not a single explanation that fits all cases. In countries where political parties swept to power with ambitious social-reform agendas, clientelism has grown as direct party-to-voter channels have been used to distribute public goods and benefits, leading to resentment over unequal access to resources.8 In South Africa, for example, the state apparatus developed since 1994 under the aegis of the dominant African National Congress has largely relied on patronage networks extending from that party, leading to a situation where patronage networks work “in parallel with, and sometimes in opposition to, the impersonal political institutions of the state.”9 Similarly in postauthoritarian Greece, the distribution of public jobs and contracts to party supporters began under Andreas Papandreou in the 1980s, while in Brazil and the Philippines political parties have long ex- isted primarily as vehicles for channeling resources to political clans.10 Even in countries where voters are not offered privileged access to benefits in exchange for political support, political parties may seek to undermine the bureaucracy’s independence in order to gain a strategic 56 Journal of Democracy advantage over their rivals. This can be seen in postauthoritarian polities that engage in selective policies of lustration—that is, the removal of civil servants who ostensibly have ties to the former regime, but in prac- tice are not members of the governing party. In Ukraine, for example, a 2014 lustration policy purged seven-hundred officials who had served in the administration of ousted president Viktor Yanukovych, while in Hungary Viktor Orbán has justified his attacks on the independence of the courts and the civil service with claims that these institutions repre- sent the forces of communism.11 Finally, a very different problem faced by many new democracies is the persistence and growth of organized crime and criminal violence. Urban security has deteriorated across much of Latin America, sub- Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe in the decades following democratic transition. In particular, this problem has been exacerbated in countries where the security services were tarnished by their associa- tion with a former dictatorship, and have faced chronic underfunding since its fall. In Brazil, for example, the murder rate during the final years of military rule was similar to the 10 per 100,000 rate found in the United States at that time, but five years after democratization had already doubled to 20 deaths per 100,000. It reached a record high of slightly above 30 per 100,000 in the year before the 2018 election of Bolsonaro, whose presidential campaign had promised to liberalize gun laws (enabling Brazilians to “defend themselves”) and give security forces the right to “shoot and kill” armed criminals. In Russia, the murder rate also soared to more than 30 per 100,000 during the first decade after the Soviet collapse. Finally, in the decade leading up to Duterte’s 2016 election as president of the Philippines, the country’s murder rate climbed from about 7 to 11 per 100,000, creating popular support for calls for harsh measures to restore urban security. In much of Eastern Europe and Latin America, not only criminal violence but also the growth of organized criminal networks threatens perceptions of democratic state efficacy. These groupings now form a shadow ex- port sector, based upon the trafficking of narcotics, arms, sex workers, and undocumented migrants to major cities in Western Europe or North America, that runs in parallel to the official supply chains of the global economy. Regardless of their exact nature, shortcomings in state capacity and the rule of law pose a serious challenge to the legitimacy of new democracies. Although political science teaches scholars to distinguish between “state legitimacy,” “regime legitimacy,” and “government legitimacy,” these three concepts are rarely so discrete in the minds of citizens.12 A newborn democracy in a state that is failing to contain corruption, conflict, or criminality will take on these attributes as its own in the public mind. Meanwhile, a succession of elected governments that become mired in scandal and policy paralysis will undermine civic Roberto Stefan Foa 57 evaluations of the democratic system as a whole, and not simply evaluations of individual administrations. This can be seen from Figure 2, which shows the relationship between changes in citizen evaluations of democracy—the average response when publics are asked if they are “satisfied” with the functioning of their democratic system—and changes in levels of corruption, as measured by the Worldwide Governance Indicators. The trend is clear: In those new democracies that have seen the greatest improvements in transparency and accountability in public life, satisfaction with the political system has risen. That is the case for the Baltic states, Taiwan, and South Korea. Yet in democracies where accountability has deteriorated most sharply, it is evident that public satisfaction has collapsed. This pattern can be observed in countries such as Greece, Brazil, and South Africa.

The Rise of Authoritarian Populism

Once we consider the effects of inadequate state capacity, the rise of “strongman” leaders across emerging democracies becomes a great deal less puzzling. Figures such as Putin in Russia, Modi in India, or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdo¢gan win support by pledging to bring back public order, state authority, and national pride, in the context of political systems exhibiting various pathologies of state failure. In early twenty-first century Russia, for example, Putin’s promise to “restore the power vertical” and end a decade of delayed salary payments, urban violence, and petty corruption proved critical to winning the support of the country’s fragile middle class, and this promise remains key to the loyalty of his dwindling support base today.13 In the Philippines, a sense of physical insecurity among the country’s swelling urban population, shaken by a homicide rate that has soared in the last decade, helps to explain why between seven and eight out of ten Filipinos continue to support Duterte’s brutal “war on drugs” despite its heavy toll in lives lost and rights violated.14 And in Brazil, almost 70 percent of voters in S~ao Paulo state voted for Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential runoff not because of any newfound distaste for homosexuality—after all, the state’s capital has hosted the world’s largest gay-pride parade annually for almost two decades—but due more to widespread disgust with political corruption, despair at the persistence of urban crime, and sympathy with calls for harsh measures to restore “order and progress.”15 A similar misunderstanding is common in analysis on other emerging democracies, where the opposition of “cosmopolitan liberalism” to “social conservatism” does a poor job of explaining the salient social cleavages and dividing lines between political parties. In Poland, for example, both the populist Law and Justice party (PiS) and the more moderate Civic Platform opposition rose to prominence in the early 2000s on socially conservative platforms, advocating stances against 58 Journal of Democracy

Figure 2—Control of Corruption and Democratic Satisfaction Among Transitional Democracies, 2000–2018

Improving Corruption, Rising Satisfaction i Poland 40%

South Korea Estonia Latvia

Portugal Slovakia 20% Croatia Czech Rep. Bulgaria Taiwan Romania Ghana Lithuania Namibia Slovenia 0% Brazil Peru Chile South Argentina Uruguay 20% Africa Panama

Greece 40%

Spain

g Worsening Corruption, Rising Dissatisfaction

Change in Satisfaction with Democracy, 2000–2018 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 Change in Control of Corruption Index, 2000–2018

Note: Bubble location reflects change from 2000 (represented by the origin at the figure’s center); bubble size reflects country population. Sources: Data on corruption are from the Worldwide Governance Indicators’ Control of Corruption measure (www.govindicators.org). Data on satisfaction with democracy are from the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Democracy dataset; see Roberto Stefan Foa et al., “The Global Satisfaction with Democracy Report 2020.” Transitional democracies are all countries which experienced a democratic transition from 1970 to 1999, currently rated as “Free” by Freedom House, for which data are available. abortion, gay marriage, and secular schooling that were broadly in line with majority public opinion. The real difference between the parties was the prominence given by PiS to issues of anticorruption and social justice, in the wake of bribery scandals that had brought down the rival Democratic Left Alliance. In particular, the party chose to decry what it termed “Latinization”: the nexus of economic privilege, political connections, and unequal access to justice depicted as characteristic of Latin American societies and, to a lesser extent, the countries of Southern Europe. One prong of PiS’s approach was to promote welfare programs for those in “left- behind” regions of the country, while the second was a “law and order” campaign that became increasingly populist in both style and implemen- tation. Ministers during the party’s first stint in government, from 2005 to 2007, went so far as to arrange televised arrests of alleged offenders, which proved widely popular despite their reliance upon weak or cir- cumstantial evidence. Roberto Stefan Foa 59

This intersection of the populist style with preexisting social and in- stitutional grievances is critical to understanding populist breakthroughs across developing democracies. It is true that populist politicians are often distinguished by a rhetorical approach that, as Cas Mudde’s classic defi- nition puts it, contrasts the “pure people” with a “corrupt elite.” Yet to cast populism simply as a rhetorical device risks ignoring its contextual significance in developing democracies where malfeasance in office is in fact relatively widespread, and deep inequalities do in fact separate political elites from the rest of society. This can also help to explain why conspiracy theories, which play a central role in populist discourse, have greater resonance in countries with dense elite networks facing only frag- mentary exposure to the public eye. In a democracy where investigative reporting does at regular inter- vals expose conspiracies and malfeasance among key political, economic, and bureaucratic actors, it is difficult to dismiss such theories out of hand, and any such accusation begins from a baseline level of “truthiness.” For concerned citizens, the line between “pragmatic skep- ticism” and simple na¦veté is blurred; there emerges a form of “post- truth politics” in which any number of plausible yet unverified claims can be circulated about one’s political opponents, leaving the average voter adrift on a sea of half-facts and falsehoods. It is therefore un- surprising that among both developed and developing democracies the relationship between support for populist politicians, who habitually lambaste corruption among elites, and the objectively assessed level of corruption is fairly strong (Figure 3). This suggests that the appeal of such anti-elite messaging is due at least in part to the behavior of elites themselves and the plausibility of conspiracy accusations, regardless of whether they turn out to be real or fictitious. The rise of “authoritarian populism” in developing democracies, in short, may require an explanation that is quite different from the theories about cultural backlash or the economically “left-behind” that are commonly applied to mature democracies. In polities where elites are distrusted, parties are weak, and welfare systems are clientelistic, antisystem movements that promise to overhaul the status quo may make broad inroads among middle-class voters, as well as among poorer voters tired of endemic corruption and urban insecurity. Meanwhile, in democracies where elite networks conceal genuine malfeasance among politicians, businessmen, and career bureaucrats, the conspiracy accusations promulgated by populist demagogues find broad resonance in society—and not simply among those who are less educated or especially credulous. This relationship has a number of implications, most importantly for democratic stability. In mature democracies such as the Netherlands or Denmark, populists are first and foremost identitarians campaigning on a platform of grievance, and this curtails their electoral appeal to at most 60 Journal of Democracy

Figure 3—The Relationship between Corruption and Populism in Developing and Developed Democracies

80% Hungary Russia

Italy Taiwan 50% Slovakia Bulgaria Poland Greece Austria France Switzerland Slovenia 25% Czech Rep. South Estonia Iceland Korea Latvia Lithuania Germany Sweden U.S. Fin. Ireland Den. Neth. 10% Portugal

Belgium U.K. Japan New Zealand 5% Australia

2% Canada

Vote Share for Populist Parties, 2010–2019 Average GDP per capita (PPP) below $40,000

GDP per capita (PPP) above $40,000 Norway

-1.0 0.0 1.0 2.0 Control of Corruption Index, 2010–2019 Average Sources: Corruption data are from Worldwide Governance Indicators’ Control of Corrup- tion Index. Data on populist-party classification and vote share are from the LSE Global Populism Database. Income data are from the IMF (2020). Note: The scale of the y-axis is a logarithmic transformation based on the function log(x+4). The correlation coefficient is -0.71. a third of the vote. They must compete with an established moderate center-right that remains appealing to the median middle-class voter, and in this context they frequently struggle to make inroads among citizens who value traditional conservative goals such as stability, account- able governance, or “law and order.” Where populist parties are able to enter government, as they have in Austria and Denmark, it is only by forming coalitions with establishment conservatives, who limit their partners’ capacities to damage liberal and democratic institutions. In this way, as Daniel Ziblatt has argued, conservative parties may play an essential role in preserving democratic stability today, as they have done in Europe historically.16 And as James Loxton contends, the same may be true in postauthoritarian regimes where former elites form “successor parties” bound to the democratic rules of the game.17 Roberto Stefan Foa 61

In fragile democracies, by contrast, authoritarian populists are able to sweep to power by combining a narrow identitarian support base with a much broader coalition of supporters among the urban middle class, who are motivated by the desire for public order, accountability, and an end to clientelism and graft. This is clear within movements such as Modi’s It is by no means Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, inevitable that, once which must balance its religious-nationalist started down the “Hindutva” wing against reformist support- road of democratic ers in the urban middle classes, but is also evident elsewhere. Putin’s early adminis- decay, a country trations, for example, included relatively will continue until it liberal and Westernizing reformers such reaches consolidated as Andrei Illarionov, Alexei Kudrin, and authoritarianism. Hermann Gräf alongside the “siloviki” network brought in from the security services. In Brazil, Bolsonaro’s government initially included reformist technocrats such as economist Paulo Guedes or the (now departed) judge Sérgio Moro alongside ideologues such as Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo. These choices satisfied the swing voters who, tempted by promises of order and reform following the mammoth Lava Jato corruption scandal, opted for Bolsonaro in the second round of the 2018 election. Finally, Erdo¢gan’s governments in Turkey have included technocratic reformers such as Ali Babacan, the deputy prime minister who was previously responsible for IMF-negotiated reforms and EU ac- cession talks, and Ahmet Davuto¢glu, who before serving as prime minister (2014–16) inspired the government’s “dual-track” foreign policy of seeking both “neo-Ottoman” influence in the Middle East and eventual EU membership. Coalitions of this kind are a response to real societal problems, but it is precisely the convergence of interests between populist currents and pragmatic reformers that imperils democratic survival. It is far easier for authoritarian populist leaders to enter office where public institutions and norms of accountability have decayed, because this allows such leaders to reach out beyond their ideological base and tap into a broader upswell of antiestablishment feeling—both among voters and among figures within the technocratic elite itself, with the latter’s participation adding legitimacy to the populist cause. Then once such temporary alli- ances have smoothed a populist’s path to power, they may give way to a more complete consolidation of personalist rule after liberal reformists are marginalized. We have seen this pattern in Russia since Putin’s return to the presi- dency in 2012, in 1990s Peru following Alberto Fujumori’s “self-coup,” and in Turkey following Erdo¢gan’s 2017 constitutional reforms. In the latter case, Erdo¢gan’s own premier and vice-premier, Davuto¢glu and 62 Journal of Democracy

Babacan, went from leading the government to founding opposition parties committed to restoring parliamentary democracy and reversing the authoritarian drift that had occurred on their watch. In this way, technocratic and liberal reformists can end up facilitating an authoritarian turn, much as they may attempt to resist this tendency from the inside—and even if they eventually join forces with their onetime civic opponents on the streets.

Democracy’s Prospects A generation has passed since the onset of the third wave of democratization, while we are more than a decade into a phase of populist mobilization sweeping both developing and developed democracies. It is therefore possible to begin drawing some general conclusions regarding the subsequent trends in democratic performance, their implications for the health of democratic institutions, and prospects for the future. While there are individual cases of countries that have managed to achieve state strengthening and political liberalization simultaneously, the general record among new democracies has been disappointing. In many countries, bureaucratic structures inherited from authoritarian regimes have been subject to attrition and clientelism. Elected politicians have used public-sector jobs as a form of patronage, engaged in partisan vetting and lustration of civil servants, tolerated corruption among party allies, and politicized formerly autonomous government agencies. Meanwhile, persistent challenges of organized criminality and violence have beset new democracies in Latin America, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. These shortcomings have not only eroded support for the first generation of posttransition political elites, but also led to fraying confidence in liberal democracy among the growing urban middle class. For this reason, authoritarian politicians promising to cut through the gridlock and “make tough decisions” have acquired a mass base of political support. In many cases, they have managed to gain elected office, and from that position have begun eroding democratic rights and freedoms—by pursuing authoritarian approaches to law and justice or to fighting ethnic insurgency, and by removing legislative checks and balances while consolidating their own power. Yet there are still reasons for optimism when it comes to the challenge of authoritarian populism in fragile democracies. First, in democracies suffering from persistent graft, scandal, and maladministration, populist movements—whether authoritarian or not—frequently serve as magnets for individuals attracted by the goal of political reform, and are sometimes capable of delivering positive measures when in office. As in the classic visual illusion, such parties may appear alternately as both the “duck” of populism and the “rabbit” of democratic refoundation, with no clear indication as to which form they will finally take. In Ukraine, Roberto Stefan Foa 63 for example, Volodymyr Zelensky’s 2019 candidacy had all the hall- marks of a populist campaign: Zelensky was a celebrity outsider lack- ing a political party, a policy platform (beyond overturning the political duopoly of then-president Petro Poroshenko and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko), or political experience (beyond performing as a Ukrainian president in a comic television series). Yet Zelensky’s campaign attracted veterans of the 2013–14 EuroMaidan protest movement, and his administration implemented serious governance reforms during its first year in office, even if this momentum has since faded. Similarly, Italy’s Five Star Movement includes under its broad tent a panoply of conspiracy theorists, postcommunist radicals, and graduates of the country’s many anticorruption campaigns, and it has now swung its support behind a technocratic administration led by former law pro- fessor Giuseppe Conte. The confusing reality of course is that such parties are both “duck” and “rabbit” simultaneously—they genuinely do include both populist extremists and idealistic reformists, and for a long period may oscillate between these tendencies. And this same contra- diction lies at the heart of more authoritarian forms of populism, such as that of India’s BJP or Bolsonaro’s founding cabinet of ideologues and technocrats. The “Janus-like” fusion of populist authoritarians and reformist technocrats does for a time yield genuine opportunities for governance reform, with no clear indication as to which faction will ultimately predominate. Second, right-wing populist administrations may eventually moderate to form establishment conservative parties within stable multiparty systems. Models for such a trajectory can be found in the political histories of established democracies—the 1958 refound- ing of the French Republic under General Charles de Gaulle, for example, or the evolution of authoritarian “successor parties” into moderate conservative parties in many new democracies, as illus- trated for instance by the Alianza Popular in post-Franco Spain. The tension within “law and order” populist movements between their more liberal, technocratic wing and their illiberal, identitarian, and authoritarian leadership is a genuine political contest—and one in which moderates do sometimes prevail, not least when the founding autocrat passes from the scene. And even when populist leaders manage to concentrate power in their individual office rather than in the ruling party—as Putin has done in Russia and Erdo¢gan has done in Turkey following the 2017 constitutional referendum—this frequently alienates moderate insiders, who then become a source of credible and experienced opposition. In addition to the above- mentioned defection of Erdo¢gan’s top officials, examples include an oppositional turn by Fujumori’s 1990 presidential running mate following the 1992 Peruvian autogolpe, or former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s spectacular unseating of his own chosen suc- 64 Journal of Democracy cessor in alliance with a jailed opposition leader during Malaysia’s 2018 election. These observations give cause for hope regarding the future of backsliding democracies. It is by no means inevitable that, once started down the road of democratic decay, a country will continue until it reaches consolidated authoritarianism. Democratic consolidation may be hard, but authoritarian consolidation is a great deal harder. Not only does the personalistic nature of populist movements make them vulnerable to changes of leadership, but factions within them may be far more ame- nable to political liberalization than is commonly appreciated, as the past decade’s steady defection of liberal reformists from the Putin and Erdo¢gan administrations illustrates. In this respect it is also important to learn from the experience of third-wave democratizations, in which internal reformists such as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev or Tai- wan’s Lee Teng-hui often played pivotal roles in paving the road to political liberalization. Working with such actors may be distasteful to many Western NGOs and activists. But if or when there is a fourth wave of democratization, its prospects for success may depend as much on reformist successors located within today’s populist movements as on liberal dissidents without.

NOTES

1. See Barry Eichengreen, The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Politi- cal Reaction in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Dani Rodrik, “Populism and the Economics of Globalization,” Journal of International Business Policy 1 (June 2018): 12–33; and Hanspeter Kriesi, “The Populist Challenge,” West European Politics 37, no. 2 (2014): 361–78.

2. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authori- tarian Populism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

3. On the sociodemographic basis of electoral support for Modi, see Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma, “The BJP’s 2014 ‘Modi Wave’: An Ideological Consolidation of the Right,” Economic and Political Weekly, 27 September 2014.

4. See Kurt Weyland, “Neoliberal Populism in Latin America and Eastern Europe,” Comparative Politics 31 (July 1999): 379–401.

5. See Thomas Carothers, “How Democracies Emerge: The ‘Sequencing’ Fallacy,” Journal of Democracy 18 (January 2007): 12–27; Francis Fukuyama, “Exchange: Liberal- ism versus State-Building,” Journal of Democracy 18 (July 2007): 10–13.

6. Francis Fukuyama, “Why Is Democracy Performing So Poorly?” Journal of De- mocracy 26 (January 2015): 11–20.

7. Roberto Stefan Foa, “Modernization and Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 29 (July 2018): 129–140.

8. Yi-Ting Wang, “Clientelistic Parties and Satisfaction with Democracy,” Party Poli- tics 26 (July 2020): 402–14. Roberto Stefan Foa 65

9. Alexander Beresford, “Power, Patronage, and Gatekeeper Politics in South Africa,” African Affairs 114 (April 2015): 226–48.

10. Only in new democracies where the posttransition parties ran on a platform of economic liberalism—as in much of Central Europe and East Asia—has clientelism been less common, as parties have not significantly extended the provision of public goods or transfers to their voters.

11. Anne Applebaum, “Ukraine Battles a Second Enemy: Corruption,” Washington Post, 29 October 2015; Cynthia M. Horne, Building Trust and Democracy: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Countries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

12. David Easton, “A Re-Assessment of the Concept of Political Support,” British Journal of Political Science 5 (October 1975): 435–57.

13. See Aleksandar Matovski, “It’s the Stability, Stupid! How the Quest to Restore Order After the Soviet Collapse Shaped Russian Popular Opinion,” Comparative Politics 50 (April 2018): 347–68.

14. Samantha Raphelson, “Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte Sustains Support for Deadly War On Drugs,” National Public Radio, 13 November 2017.

15. For election results, see https://www.tre-sp.jus.br/eleicoes/eleicoes-anteriores/ eleicoes-2018.

16. Daniel Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 2017).

17. James Loxton, Conservative Party-Building in Latin America: Authoritarian In- heritance and Counterrevolutionary Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, forth- coming).